Wanda-Doubters

[WildForest at aol.com]

OK, I've received dozens of queries from Doubting Thomas's...so to
speak...about the Tinasky Affair.

No problem.  I've got some advice for you:  Play it safe, don't endorse.
 Probe and tease.  No sense in becoming a Hugh Trevor-Roper.  Not yet anyway.

Some find the endorsement of Burgess, a fatal flaw...very funny....(he's my
wife's distant cousin, and a real ass).  But its a joke, yes?  Graham Greene
senile could hand AB (the drunken sot) his ass any day of the week, and WT
knows it.  Well, knows it as well as any bag lady living under the bridge on
the redwood coast could, you understand.

The real joke is that AB is one of the few "writers" who can't be assailed by
Hollywood:  the movies will always be better than his books, yes?

Personally, I wonder:  Would the real Mr. P praise Doctorow  with such
extravagence, while dissing Borges?  But I conclude, it doesn't matter.
 Afterall, its not P its WT.  This a character, talking.  Several characters,
in fact, as you will see from the shifting tenor of the voices in these
letters.  

Not knowing what I now know...I probably would never have suspected TRP of
writing these missives...except that evil dentist stuff is something of a
giveaway, right?  

And there are many more hidden clues to come, for those in the know...as all
of you certainly are...but, then I must ask myself, how much of this is
simply wanting it to be true...a desperate longing like Stencil in Paris
(yes...Paris...very interesting) or those fractal-freaks rummaging about god
knows where?

There are those who will say:  Pynchon doesn't write like this.  The letters
lack the grace, the imagery, the wordplay of GR.  Well, frankly (and am I the
only Tommyphile who thinks this way?) those days are long gone.  Perhaps
years of dropping acid have taken their toll, the way time, drugs, and
christianity have ravaged Dylan's voice.  Don't get me wrong Vineland's
great, but I, for one, am not expecting a Pynchonian Finnegan's Wake to
emerge in 96, or thereafter, are you?  

Still there is a logic to this madness.

Go back and read TP's pieces written around this time.  The intro to Slow
Learner (Bicycle Man?...very funny...perhaps the advance helped defray
his/her living expenses, eh?), for example.  The review of Love in the Time
of Cholera.  And later stuff, like the Sloth piece.  Exchange MacNeil and
Lehrer for Cagney & Lacey, and Laverne & Shirley, heh.  Not bad.

Vineland, itself, has pages of this kind of discursive discourse,
free-floating, dashed off, if not Ornette Coleman-like, perhaps similar to a
long Jerry Garcia-sounding riff, slightly out of tune, meandering, a stoned
essence...where one thing simply leads to another, in a long daisy chain of
thoughts strung together like sentences...Mendo talk.  Perhaps, you have to
have been there.

Adios.
JSC